(First Edition, Signed Bookplate) No one gives us the city of London like Peter Ackroyd, and in this witty, rapier-sharp novel—one of our favorites at Daedalus—he takes us back to the Swinging London of the 1960s. Harry, Daniel, and Sam Hanway, born on a postwar council estate in Camden Town, are marked from the start by curious coincidence, and each is forced to make his own way in the city. From bustling, cutthroat Fleet Street to the hallowed publishing houses of the West End, from the wealth and corruption of Chelsea to the smoky shadows of Limehouse and Hackney, London itself is a character in Ackroyd's notably Dickensian novel, revealing how a place and its history can mold, delimit, and engulf us.

"Three Brothers is an alternative autobiography, a ghost story and a murder mystery all in one slim volume. Dickens, Blake, and Eliot—all subjects of lives by Ackroyd—cast shadows over the three-ply narrative that is full of chance and coincidence.... The waspish vignettes of literary London and fusty academe are a delight. The air is full of poison—and echoes of other Ackroyd novels. He sees the capital as 'a web so taut and tightly drawn' that the slightest movement sets off a chain of events.... The brilliant result is the quintessence of Ackroyd."—Telegraph (London)